IS SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE RATIONAL? Publication year: 2008 Cover: Hardcover Number of Pages: 245 p. List Price: $ 50 US ISBN: 978-605-5949-06-8 Table of Contents

The dominance of science as well as its status are indisputable in today’s culture. Today, while rationality has come to be identified with science, natural science is considered to be the best instance of rational thought. Halil Rahman Açar expounds the problem of rationality that has always been a core philosophical issue as it is today. Açar presents to us, rationality, not only as an issue of science or philosophy, but also of ethics, religion, psychology, sociology and anthropology. He critiques the identification of scientific knowledge with rationality.

Rationality, as Açar develops, should be considered as an alternative system of interpreting knowledge which seeks a synthesis between extreme pools. This study, while examining the very notion of rationality, leading to truth and science, questions the assumed paradigm of human rationality in reference to its nature and the concepts of objectivity, truth and progress in science.

About the author
Halil Rahman Açar (Ph.D., Middle East Technical University, 2000) is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yüzüncü Yıl University in Van, Turkey. He has published works on philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of education and ethics.